New Road to Costambar

well...

Costambar is Costambar... what can I say? I live here... uneventful, quiet, common blackouts... new road??? Is that the road that is covered in gravel that nobody uses coming off of the main road? If it is... nobody has been working on it.

The "new" road..............

The new road................
...............is ALMOST, but not quite like the old road was. It looked like they were going to do it correctly. Put the sidewalks in from the gate of Costambar to the entrance to the barrio. Then leveled it off well, put in the large drain that was needed under the road right before the new clinic.................and then instead of using asphalt, they used oil and stone...............and so, the road is almost like it was before.....just not as bumpy yet, but will be in about 2 months. The holes are already forming.

As far as the part from the barrio out to the main road, that is just as bad, if not worse, than before. When you ask the locals what happened, you get the same excuse you hear about every project in POP......."the engineer ran away with the money".....................

ahhhhhhhhhhh....

That explains why I have not seen anything that resembles a "new road"....

The new road..................

..............is now much WORSE than the old road. Didn't take as long as most people expected. Instead of having a few big holes in a few places you now have hundreds of basketball holes on the whole road. It now takes longer to get out of Costambar on this road than to drive to the center of the city of Puerto Plata once you get off it!!!!!! ........but noone cares!

Don't feel special.

They did all of El Choco the same way and I kept waiting for them to come back and finish it with asphalt and they never did. Fell apart in two months, and, just like you said, thousands of basketball sized holes all over the road. Spent RD$20K fixing my car in that time, welding the chasis, fixing panels that had fallen off, broken mirrors, brake lines, etc. Hell! The hood latch even broke, the hood flew up and shattered the windshield and we had to replace all that.

They just came back and patched the holes with asphalt -and- a real honest-to-God steamroller! I about drove off the road in shock seeing that. Must have been the only steamroller on the island. Then guess what? They threw stone and oil over the whole thing again. :: sigh ::

Is this just 'planned obsolescense' Dominican style? Do a job that'll last a few months so you have to keep coming back and doing it again? I have had so many plumbers and electricians to half-assed jobs like that I do my own work now. Or, is it just really stupid so-called 'engineers'?

Tom (aka XR)